Friday, November 22, 2013

Your weekend reading

Healthcare--My post on March 22, 2010. Things have gone much
as I expected.
As I write this, it looks like they have the votes to, as Mark Steyn says,
fundamentally change America
into a nation of government dependents, demanding ever more from the dwindling
supply of wealth producers in the private sector. We are about 20 years behind Greece, but
closing, so even that canary in the mine may be too late to warn us. With this
passed, no political group will have the will or courage to go back, so we will
go forward to the eventual fiscal collapse and chaos. Given my age and health,
I’ll miss most of it. Teach your kids to shoot. That’s a skill they will need
in the coming dark ages. This bill is, of course, only the first step to
complete government control. Have to credit the stress Democrats were under.
Let’s see, if I hold out I might sell my vote for more, but if they get to 216,
I’ll get nothing…. Oh, the challenge.

Excerpt: Brokers and agents say a host of technological
problems is blocking their ability to help consumers sign up for coverage through the federal
health insurance Web site. They say it is a particular
problem for people with major health issues — those considered high-risk —
because they are least able to weather a gap in coverage.

Excerpt: E-mails released late Thursday by House Republicans
investigating the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov offer a snapshot of the
chaos that unfolded behind the scenes within the Obama administration
in the days and hours leading up to the troubled launch. The 17 pages of notes released by the House Energy and
Commerce Committee show tense communications between officials at the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and one of its contractors, with some
worried that the system was not performing to expectations as the Oct. 1 launch
date approached.

Excerpt: HealthCare.gov was unable to consistently handle
500 users at once in the testing, and tests failed with 2,000 users over a
three-day period, according to a series of emails between members of the
information technology team at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,
or CMS. (Here's a fascinating lesson from the past year: President Obama isn't
really that interested in Obamacare. Oh, he's
invested his future in it, and he speaks about it as if it's important to him.
But his behavior suggests otherwise -- particularly when you see a report
like this. --Jim Geraghty, Morning
Jolt)

Internet Joke

WARNING: After a recent wave of identity thefts, the FBI
estimates there are over 500 fake Obamacare websites set up for the sole
purpose of stealing your personal information. So protect yourself and
remember: the real one is the one that doesn't work.

Excerpt: Predictably, Edsall goes on to blame opposition to
ObamaCare on "a critical mass of white voters" who have not
"moved past [their] resistance to programs shifting tax dollars and other
resources from the middle class to poorer minorities." If you don't want
the government to redistribute your wealth to somebody else, you must be
racist.

ObamaCare Forced Mom
Into Medicaid: My mother preferred to pay for her care rather than be on the
government dole. Now she has no choice. By Nicole L. Hopkins

Excerpt: The post continued:
"I just received a notice: 'In order to comply with the new healthcare
law, your current health plan will be discontinued on December 31, 2013.'
Currently my premium is $276 and it is a stretch for me to cover. The
new plan . . . are you ready . . . projected new rate $415.20. Now I can't
afford health insurance." (Pushing people into Medicaid is one of the
unexpected effects of the program. Well.... unexpected by most of us, but
apparently not a big surprise to some of the experts who were looking into all
this many months ago. But the word never got all the way up the ladder to the
Oval Office, or so it seems. --Del. This is not a bug. It's a feature. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: On the other hand, between now and November 2014, I
am willing to bet that the vast majority of the voting population will answer
yes to questions 8 and 9. And that is why, in spite of the Left's desperate
attempts to find some equivalents between the burgeoning Obamacare debacle and
the sins of the Right (as they define them), it's really no contest.

Round 2 of ObamaCare
enrollment to be delayed until after 2014 midterms

Excerpt: The Obama administration plans to delay the start
of next year's ObamaCare enrollment period, a move pitched as a way to give
consumers and insurance companies more time to study their options -- but which
also conveniently pushes the second round of enrollment past the 2014 midterm
elections. (Gee, Mr. President, I thought you said it was working well.
Why the delay? ~Bob)

Excerpt: The New
York Times, which never hesitated to call George W. Bush a
liar, switched up its euphemisms and began calling Obama’s lie an
“incorrect promise”. NBC News called it a “promise they couldn’t
keep.” The Associated Press called
it an “inflated promise.”

Excerpt: The president’s “if you like it” bait-and-switch on
insurance is not the only pledge that will be broken under ObamaCare. Press
Secretary Jay Carney appeared to step back from the second part
of President Obama’s oft-repeated campaign promise: that Americans could
keep their doctors if they like them.

Small business owners
to Congress: I liked my health care plan just fine — and now it’s gone

Excerpt: Individual consumers aren’t the only ones losing
their health care plans as a result of new rules in the health care law. Small
business owners have had their policies nixed, too. Some are not too pleased —
and several of them made that crystal clear to their elected representatives on
Wednesday.

Excerpt: The poll's latest
results hit some new records, and none of them are good news for the White
House. Only 33% have a favorable view of the president's signature piece of
legislation; that's a record low. Forty-nine percent have an unfavorable view,
which is only two-points off the record. Most striking is that approval among
Democrats has plummeted 15 points, from 70% to 55%. (Barack Obama: "And
ultimately, if you’ve got a majority of folks who believe in something, then it
should be able to pass." Like repeal of Obamacare? ~Bob)

Well, according to Obama, they were junk plans anyway. ~Bob.
Excerpt: The 7-year-old, who loves playing games on his iPad, is reportedly the
youngest person to have his type of cancer. Hunter has Plexiform Hishocyne
Neoplasm. ... “I called them and they said we were dropped October 31st,”
Krista said. Krista says an insurance agent told her that Hunter’s information
got lost when they made changes under the new Affordable Care Act.

Excerpt: Then there are the millions of people that
supposedly tried to sign up for healthcare coverage and then gave up after
hours of frustration. Those that do get through the system and get their quotes
find that their exchange policies will cost them more than their monthly
mortgage payment. But not this story. It will bring a smile to your face while
at the same time adding another strike to the growing list of mistakes that
have happened due to Obamacare.

Excerpt: Less certain is what Yellen ultimately intends to
do with Fed policy on quantitative easing (QE), now entering its 34th month.
She is committed to maintaining QE for now, but does she have an exit strategy?
The Fed needs one, because the economic stakes could not be higher, say Thomas
Saving, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis and
professor of economics and the director of the Private Enterprise Research
Center at Texas A&M University, and Phil Gramm, a former chairman of the
Senate Banking Committee. If we listen to the Fed governors, the potentially
explosive increase in the money supply inherent in the current $2.3 trillion of
excess bank reserves won't be allowed to occur. At the first sign of a real
economic recovery, the Fed will sell Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities
(MBSs) to soak up excess bank reserves, or achieve the same result through
repurchase agreements and paying banks to hold excess reserves. It sounds
simple, but in a full-blown recovery the Fed will have to execute its exit
strategy quickly enough to keep the inflation genie in the bottle without
driving interest rates up to levels that would derail the recovery. And every
month that the Fed's monetary expansion continues, its exit strategy becomes
more difficult and dangerous.

Interesting: The Distribution of Tax and Spending
Policies in the United
States

Excerpt: Key Findings. The question of who benefits from
government spending is just as important as the question of who pays taxes. In
other words, how do tax and spending policies redistribute income? American’s
lowest-income families receive $5.28 worth of government spending (federal,
state, and local) for every $1 they pay in total taxes. Middle-income families
receive $1.48 in total spending per tax dollar, while America’s
highest-income families receive $0.25 cents in spending for every dollar of
taxes paid. As a group, the bottom 60 percent of American families receive more
back in total government spending than they pay in total taxes. Government tax and spending policies combine to redistribute
more than $2 trillion from the top 40 percent of families to the bottom 60
percent. The total amount of redistribution has increased slightly over the
past 12 years. Middle-income and working lower-income families were the biggest
beneficiaries. Lawmakers can remove equity as an issue in tax reform by
matching any loss in progressivity on the tax side with an equal increase in
progressivity on the spending side.

Excerpt: There were two motivations for the CARS program.
The first was to provide temporary stimulus to counter the economic contraction
that was occurring at that time. The other was to improve the fuel efficiency
of the existing stock of vehicles, in order to reduce emissions. Our evaluation
of the evidence suggests that the $2.85 billion in vouchers provided by the
program had a small and short-lived impact on gross domestic product, essentially
shifting roughly a few billion dollars forward from the subsequent two quarters
following the program. The implied cost per job created due to the program was
much higher than what was estimated for alternative fiscal stimulus programs.
This does not account for the decrease in the capital stock stemming from the
program’s requirement that the traded in used cars be destroyed.

How Much Is That
X-Ray? Still Hard To Say, Even In Massachusetts.
By Martha Bebinger, WBUR

Excerpt: Finding out how much an X-ray costs sounds
like a simple question. But it is actually very difficult to get an
answer. In Massachusetts,
a new state law requires
insurers to be able to tell members how much a test, treatment or surgery will
cost.

Excerpt: The filibuster now exists in what you might call an
unstable equilibrium. It theoretically forces a 60-vote threshold on important
legislation. But it can — and now, in part, has —been undone with 51
votes. Its only protection was the perceived norm against using the 51-vote
option. Democrats just blew that norm apart. The moment one party or the
other filibusters a consequential and popular bill, that's likely the end of
the filibuster, permanently.

Excerpt: The victim was attacked by 17-year-old Marvell
Weaver. But Weaver did more than try to knock his victim out, he tried to do it
with a taser. Luckily for the victim, the taser didn’t work and he was able to
protect himself with his concealed-carry .40 caliber pistol.

Excerpt: At various times and places, the “game” has been
called “Knockout,” “Knockout King,” “One-Hitter-Quitter,” “Pick ’Em Out and
Knock ’Em Down,” “Knock ’Em and Drop ’Em,” and “Polar-Bear Hunting” (most
likely in reference to whites). The attacks are unprovoked and often happen in
broad daylight. They can be deadly. So far, six fatalities resulting from
Knockout have been documented.

Excerpt: It’s an infuriating example of political
correctness: Most of New York City’s media outlets have sanitized the nature of
a spate of unprovoked attacks upon hapless pedestrians — all recent victims of
the so-called “knockout game.” There have been injuries and several deaths
among men, women, and youngsters, as they suffered walloping “sucker punches”
by roving black youths in New York
City and elsewhere. (let one white kid beat up a black
and the media will give it the Full Trayvon. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: At least three of the dozens of NYC victims of the
games have died in recent weeks. It is hard for any words to capture the true
evil and violence of the crime, but the videos
posted by those who celebrate it capture it well (viewer discretion is
advised).

Excerpt: But such arguments are for professional political
protagonists. For the normal American who doesn’t live and breathe politics,
the simple fact is that Democrats and Republicans alike have failed to live up
to their brands. (It's the central problem of a Democracy with increasingly
low-information, unengaged voters, who tend to vote for whoever promises the
most. So you over-promise or lose. When you over-promise, the voters come to
hate you, thus the approval ranking of Congress. ~Bob.)

Excerpt: According to the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC), Britain's
Forced Marriage Unit took in 1,485 such cases in 2012. And that's just a
drop in the proverbial bucket: Britain's
Chief Prosecutor Nazir Afzal told the ABC, "There are probably between
8,000 to 10,000 forced marriages or threats of forced marriage in the UK every
year."

Excerpt: In reality, Kennedy was not a liberal in
today’s sense of the word, but a conservative Democrat, a Cold-War
warrior and tax-cutter, as documented by Ira Stoll
in JFK, Conservative. Far from the civil rights saint portrayed
in the legend, his support for civil rights legislation was lukewarm, driven by
the momentum for desegregation started before him by Truman’s desegregation
of the armed forces, and codified by Eisenhower in the 1957 and 1960 Civil
Rights acts, the first civil rights legislation since 1875.

Excerpt: The worst Christian massacre—complete with mass
graves, tortured-to-death women and children, and destroyed churches—recently
took place in Syria, at the hands of the U.S.-supported jihadi “rebels”;
and the U.S. government and its “mainstream
media” mouthpiece are, as usual, silent (that is, when not actively trying
to minimize matters).

Excerpt: matters came to a head on November 15, the
deadliest day in Tripoli
since Kadhafi's ouster. Gunmen from the Misrata militia opened fire on
demonstrators demanding they leave the city, killing a number of them. In
retaliation, members of another militia assaulted villas which the Misrata
fighters were occupying , setting off clashes that lasted into the next day.
(So, BO, how's your unauthorized, lead-from-behind was working out? ~Bob)

Excerpt: Clashes between suspected al-Qaida militants,
including women, and Yemeni troops left one officer, three soldiers, and at least
two militants dead in the country's south, security officials said Wednesday.
The raid ended with the arrest of a number of militants, including several
women.

Excerpt: Three women have been "rescued" from a
south London
house as police investigate claims they were held as slaves for about 30 years.
... Police said the two people arrested were not British nationals and it was
"very unlikely" that the alleged victims were related to the suspects
because of their nationalities.

Excerpt: 11:15AM Pacific Time, 22 November,
1963...a Friday. We were in typing class, breathing easy...the rest of
this school day was a breeze. Typing class, lunch, then Phys Ed, French II,
then home for the weekend. Next week, a short week because of Thanksgiving. Then
the squawk of loudspeaker and the sad and somber voice of our high school
principal. Boys and Girls, we have just learned that President Kennedy has been
shot in Dallas.
You are to go home. For those of you who use the bus, we have ordered them up
and are available curbside on the east side of the school. We all just sat
there, no one moving to leave. ... Ironic, but the most revered President of
our generation, a Democrat, he could never even win his party's nomination
today. He believed in a strong military, was a war hero himself, believed in
cutting taxes to spur economic growth, was deathly afraid of incurring a
national debt, and believed in giving a hand up and not a hand out. (My senior
year. I was in study hall when the loud speaker came on. Last period we had a
pep rally for the football game on Saturday--which was cancelled. After the
rally, the Principal, Mr. Lance, announced the President's death. The scene was
very emotional. ~Bob)

The Man and the Myth: Why prudent politicians embrace the
JFK legacy. By Fred Barnes

Excerpt: For subsequent presidents, getting along with the Kennedy
family and political clique is fairly simple but requires discipline. Those who
refer favorably to JFK in speeches, quote him often, and embrace his widow,
children, and relatives—they fare quite well. Presidents who don’t, especially
those who get in squabbles with the Kennedy tribe, suffer.

Excerpt: While examining some of his administration's fiscal
and foreign policies, it becomes apparent that President Kennedy leaned towards
conservatism -- and that he might even have been labeled a conservative had he
lived in the present day.

Excerpt: The granddaughter of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail
Haniyeh was evacuated to an Israeli hospital in critical condition Sunday
afternoon, but was returned to her family in Gaza Monday after her condition was deemed
incurable, an Israeli military spokesman said Monday.

Excerpt: Philip Chism left a folded piece of paper with the
words 'I hate you all' next to the corpse of Colleen Ritzer after he slit her
throat in a bathroom and left her body in a 'sexually staged' position at
Danvers High School in Massachusetts, according to court papers. (Be big news
if he was white an she was black, but not the way it was. ~Bob)

Excerpt: Many of these same media organizations helped carry
Obama into office on their backs like pack mules, and now they’re upset that
their ability to take pictures has been severely restricted by the most transparent
administration in history.

Excerpt: Mangum stabbed boyfriend Reginald Daye with a
kitchen knife during an argument in April 2011. Daye died at the hospital 10
days later from complications related to the stabbing. (This was the woman the
Duke Faculty, the media led by the NYT and other leftists declared a sainted
victim when conducting a media lynching of the players. ~Bob)

Excerpt: When our Founders promised the “pursuit of
happiness,” what they were really promising was the ability to earn our own
success—to create value with their lives, and create value in the lives of
others.

Excerpt: Odd that pending sales of homes declining in
September were followed by a decline in closed home sales in October? Odd how 7
of 8 jobs created have been part time since the 30 hour mandate in Obamacare
was announced? Odd how the economy hasn’t recovered?

Excerpt: “A few of us saw a backbencher from the Illinois
state legislature,” wrote long-time Obama watcher, John Kass of
the Chicago Tribune, “a guy who took orders, then rode to the White House on a
personality cult, finally exposed.”

Dashcam Video
Released Of Vet’s Viral Arrest For ‘Rudely Displaying’ Rifle On Hike With Son –
And It Reveals The Context Everyone’s Been Waiting For

Excerpt: Officials in Bell County,
Texas, have released the dashcam footage of a
police officer in Temple, Texas, disarming and arresting decorated
veteran C.J. Grisham while he was on a hike with his son in March. The officer
is seen grabbing the dad’s gun and then seemingly attempting to unlatch it from
the man’s sling without telling him why or asking for permission.

The Politicization of Everything: In the Obama era, the
government’s hunt for victims and their oppressors has become ceaseless.
By Victor Davis Hanson

Excerpt: What, then, is the Obama legacy? An insidious
politicization of almost everything. Obamism has become a holistic concept of
“fundamentally transforming America”
that, like all ideologies, cannot be assessed solely by concrete laws and
policies, but rather through a change in the mentality and spirit of Americans
and those who govern them.